Month: December 2013

Several years ago, my parents, my sister and brother-in-law, and my husband and I went in together on a 100-year-old log cabin on 12 acres in the North Carolina mountains. After a couple of trips up from Florida to make it almost livable (replaced leaky roof, fixed septic system so toilets would flush, etc.), we decided to all spend Christmas up there. The cabin had no heat, and we couldn’t build a fire in the fireplace, because the chimney had toppled years earlier. So we tried our best to keep warm by the wood-burning stove we had installed on one of our previous trips.